Newcastle United made a play for Liam Delap but the striker was always 'keen' on reuniting with Enzo Maresca at Chelsea and completed a £30m move to Stamford Bridge
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Liam Delap and his Chelsea team-mates arrive in the U.S. for the Club World Cup
Liam Delap and his Chelsea team-mates arrive in the U.S. for the Club World Cup
Enzo Maresca has revealed that it was 'quite an easy' conversation to convince Newcastle United target Liam Delap to join Chelsea.
Chelsea, Manchester United, Newcastle, Nottingham Forest and Everton were among the clubs who all made a play for the highly-rated striker.
However, Chelsea won the race to sign Delap from Ipswich Town - even though Maresca could not offer any guarantees to the 22-year-old about game time.
"I never say to players, 'You are going to be first choice'," the Chelsea boss said. "The message is always the same.
"You arrive, you work hard, you work more than the other number nine and you are going to be first choice. The conversation with Liam has been quite clear. He was keen to join us because he knows the way we play.
"The season that we were together [at Manchester City], we won for the first time the under-23 competition. He scored 24, 25 goals that season so he knows exactly what we can give to him and I know what Liam can give us so it's a win, win.
"The conversation was quite an easy conversation. We like Liam and Liam likes us so it was an easy conversation."
Although Delap will have to earn his place in the side, challenging Nicolas Jackson for a starting berth is a different proposition to going head to head with, say, Alexander Isak at Newcastle.
Chelsea, who spent £119.1m more than Newcastle on salaries in top-flight clubs' most recently released set of accounts, were also able to offer higher wages.
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